Four New Collections of Omnivorous Literary Criticism

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CreditJohn Gall

By Heather Scott Partington

June 23, 2017

MORE ALIVE AND LESS LONELY On Books and WritersBy Jonathan Lethem Edited by Christopher Boucher 300 pp. Melville House. $26.99.

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Lethem is literature’s ultimate fanboy, something he celebrates in this assemblage of reviews, literary introductions and bird walks from the last 20 years or so. In it, we observe Lethem’s signature esoteric fascination with books, records, even slices of pizza. He is a champion of unknown authors, yet also claims luminaries like Kafka for himself. The collection offers a comprehensive view of his evolution as a critic — from the “erratic booklust” of his teens to the distinct intellectualism and genial crankiness of his current work. To borrow from his description of Donald Barthelme, “his attention drifts beautifully.” Lethem’s earnestness is satisfying, but it’s his vulnerability, his willingness to expose his own flaws, that endears. “Some of these pieces embarrass me,” he admits in a new essay following two on Kazuo Ishiguro. He’s worked to become “more personal, more willingly subjective.” A picture emerges of Lethem’s critical career: an exercise in curiosity, affection and eager negative capability. One quibble: His references — from Batman to Freud and DeLillo — are mostly male. But whether he’s ruminating on “Moby-Dick” or Karl Ove Knausgaard’s “My Struggle,” all of Lethem’s work does what he suggests good criticism should do: It sends us back to the original texts. As he says of the Italian critic Roberto Calasso, “His readings feel familiar, as though his erudition were inside us, a pre-existing condition only waiting for diagnosis.” Lethem’s words remind us of our own rabid fandoms.

Critics of world literature, Kirsch writes, see translation into English and the homogenization of style as obliterating nuance. In this explication of the global novel as a genre, Kirsch rejects that argument, examining works by eight exemplary authors — Orhan Pamuk, Roberto Bolaño, Haruki Murakami, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Mohsin Hamid, Michel Houellebecq, Margaret Atwood and Elena Ferrante — an “inevitably partial” list that’s “also intended to be representative” of the global novel’s multiple paths to success. “What unites all these various approaches,” he writes, “is the insistence on the global dimension not just of contemporary experience, but of contemporary imagination.”

Who has the authority to speak for the world? Are Western ideals central to global literature, or do speculative novels that unspool Western ideas to tragic ends (like Atwood’s “Oryx and Crake” and Houellebecq’s “The Possibility of an Island”) epitomize literary colonialism? Kirsch’s work is curious and illuminating. He asks whether a writer can be fairly tasked with being a cultural ambassador. Kirsch postulates that there’s no formula for a representative work: Ferrante embraces the provincial rather than the broadly international, demonstrating how the local is a “necessary complement” to global stories, while Adichie and Hamid show America as a transitional stop in a life of ingression and departure. Kirsch’s work ends abruptly, however, leaving us ironically to ponder his theory that “it is impossible to fully know a place, or a book, from outside.”

To McCarthy, each story is formed from the baseness of the human condition, but silence conveys infinite opportunity. These essays, published previously in journals like The London Review of Books, dissect literature by Kafka, Joyce, Shakespeare and more; art by Gerhard Richter; even ambience, like the “white noise” of London’s weather. McCarthy sees lust and sickness as inseparable elements of humanity, and “Ulysses” as an emetic, scatological grotesque. His anatomical analysis mostly succeeds, except in a fraught explication of David Lynch’s films that forces the idea of prosthesis as “an ontological condition.”

Most striking are essays like “The Geometry of the Pressant,” in which McCarthy is haunted by his critical and literary forefathers. Often, this means the French poet Stéphane Mallarmé, who McCarthy says is “obsessed with the question of the pause, the interval, the recess.” McCarthy similarly measures out the space between things, mining possibility from each emblematic story. “We don’t want plot, depth or content,” he writes in “Stabbing the Olive”: “We want angles, arcs and intervals; we want pattern. Structure is content.” Anything is decryptable to McCarthy, who works like one of his bumper car (or “dodgem”) jockeys, “nudging things along, sorting out blockages.” Realism isn’t real, he argues, offering a more associative, “digressing, sliding, jolting, looping” model of thought as true realism and invoking such a strategy in his own work. It’s a privilege to float alongside him in these essays, to watch the connections form.

“Poets’ lives are seldom eventful or interesting,” Kleinzahler writes in this collection. “There’s a great deal of looking out the window, pacing around, reading, writing, drinking, gossiping, complaining, especially about money and neglect, and more often than not ill-advised romantic attachments.” Yet Kleinzahler, a celebrated poet in his own right, makes merry work of the gossip surrounding myriad writers of postmodern poetry and so-called New Fiction. The book is characterized by nostalgia mixed with surgical literary and syntactic analysis. “The artist who also writes criticism,” he says, “will, inevitably, tell you what he himself is up to, or at least aspires to.” It is no surprise, then, that Kleinzahler turns his critical eye to writers of every ilk, celebrating the unheralded genius of critics like Kenneth Cox and the more polished public image of icons like Allen Ginsberg.

Kleinzahler’s observations are frequently choreographic, invoking movement and cinema to characterize poets like Roy Fisher, in whose work the “eye darts about. … It abhors the object at rest, framing of any kind. It’s like a camera jerking and swiveling on an unstable tripod.” The heart of Kleinzahler’s work is a tender affection for his mentors, like Thom Gunn (“a bit like a dream uncle”), and the mist-covered pockets of San Francisco, incubators of his literary life. Kleinzahler looks back for inspiration, not forward. “Everything should be where it’s supposed to be,” he writes, “which is where it was.”

Heather Scott Partington, the winner of an emerging critic fellowship from the National Book Critics Circle, has written for Electric Literature, The Los Angeles Times and other publications.